“What is wrong with us?” Naomi Klein asks near the start of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, her ambitious new polemic. Her answer turns upside-down the narrative that the country’s largest environmental groups have been telling.
“Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process. Climate change, she writes, “if treated as a true planetary emergency,” could “become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”
